There is one discouraging aspect, however. In an hour of discussion about the sharia threat, not one of the expert speakers pointed out that Islam has invaded America largely through diverse immigration; further, that admitting likely enemies should stop.

So back in those days, we had a great — I thought, the greatest trial judge in the United States at the time, later the Attorney General of the United States, Michael Mukasey, who, after hearing arguments about it, would not allow that defense to be presented to the jury, on the common-sense principle that we are in the United States, and we follow American law in the United States. And it didn’t matter what Sharia said, or really — not just to single out Sharia — what any other religious code would say in terms of where religious law would collide with the civil law. Because there’s a lot of Supreme Court law that says that, you know, basically if you allow chaos like that, you have every person being a law unto himself. And that’s not an acceptable way to have a civil society. So that defense got bounced out pretty easily.

The reason I think that’s interesting is — flash forward almost 20 years, in my own home state of New Jersey. And we had a woman, a Muslim woman, who was married to a Muslim man who she was trying to divorce, who was serially raping and beating her. And she went into New Jersey state court to try to get a protective order. And the court refused to give her the protective order under circumstances where there was no doubt that the attacks and the sexual abuse was actually going on. But the court reasoned that he was simply following his religious principles, under which his own understanding of them was that she had no right to say no.

So think about that. We go from 20 years ago — where a Sharia defense basically gets laughed out of court on a very straightforward, confident idea of American law that we follow our own law in the United States, we don’t — Sharia’s not the law of the land — to a situation we have now where — not just in New Jersey; that case happened to be reversed on appeal — but in almost every state in the Union, we’ve had Sharia principles creeping into our law.

Robert Spencer is the author of several books about Islamic jihad and runs the website JihadWatch.org:

The Egyptian magazine that Jamie mentioned in his introduction, that was boasting about Muslim Brotherhood influence in the United States — what it actually said — these are the exact words from the article — that Muslim Brotherhood infiltrators into the US government have transformed the US from a position hostile to Islamic groups and organizations in the world to the largest and most important supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Now see, it’s bitterly ironic, isn’t it, that Michele Bachmann is ridiculed and pilloried for calling for an investigation into Muslim Brotherhood infiltration in the government. And then, over in Egypt, they’re boasting about Muslim Brotherhood infiltration in the government and naming as the infiltrators many of the same people that she adduced as evidence for the need for such an investigation.

Now, the thing about Barack Obama is that he has, of course, enabled this, encouraged it, and continues to do so. Witness the Brennan appointment and the Hagel appointment, and so many others. But as Andy has pointed out, it began far before he became President. And George W. Bush stood in 2001, right after the 9/11 attacks, in a mosque in Washington, D.C. And right behind him was Nihad Awad, the head of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which is a Muslim Brotherhood group in the United States. And George Bush, of course, famously proclaimed Islam is a religion of peace.

Now, Bush was also sanguine about the infiltration of Muslim Brotherhood operatives into the United States. And there are photographs of him in meetings with Abdulrahman Alamoudi, who was the great friend of Grover Norquist, who is now serving 23 years in prison for financing al-Qaeda. That is, Alamoudi is, not Norquist. Unfortunately, Norquist is not yet in prison.

But the thing that I most am concerned about is about my own profession, and the extraordinary brain-drain that has occurred over the last four or five years as a result of the economic downturn. Now, when I grew up in the profession, most of the people I learned from were not afraid to ask difficult questions at a White House press conference. They certainly would not have accepted as easily as the media did the early explanations of Benghazi. Just common sense told us that that could not have been a spontaneous protest. You didn’t have to be a genius to figure out that people don’t show up at spontaneous protests with mortars and RPGs, not even in Libya.

And yet, none in the media were willing to ask the questions that needed to be asked — what has happened? And what I like to call [it] is there’s a benign neglect within the media, caused mostly by financial pressures. But it’s resulted in this incredible — centuries of knowhow have walked out of newsroom with buyouts in the last couple of years. And expertise and courage, the skill that you get by being a journalist for 25 years, to ask a hard question, not to be afraid to go against the grain in the press briefing with the White House Press Security and the Pentagon Press Secretary — it’s really been depleted from our industry. And as a result, we’re beginning to see really extraordinary impact.

And I call it benign in the sense that I don’t think the media did this intentionally and said — boy, we’re going to do this, and we’re all in the tank for Obama. I think just the economics created a sort of unexpected shredding down of our capabilities. But its extraordinary consequences are not benign whatsoever. If we’re going to understand and win the war on terror, we have to have a basis of facts upon which to do that — concrete, in-depth facts, understanding and analysis. And we’re not getting that in the media today very much.

The brain-drain is everywhere. When I was executive editor of the Washington Times in 2008, I had six full-time reporters dedicated to national security, names you probably have all heard of — Bill Gertz, Rowan Scarborough, Sara Carter — real names, people who for 25 years knew every nook and cranny of the Pentagon or the CIA. And when someone spoke a word that wasn’t truthful, they were able to get the truth and get it out.